Temporal vs Timeless God

What it means to be eternal and what it means to be timeless are two different questions. For God to be eternal means that He always existed and always will exist. God has no beginning and no end. To be timeless, on the other hand, means that God is outside time or doesn’t exist within time, has no temporal location and temporal terms don’t apply to God. Some reasons to embrace a timeless God is it emphasizes God’s transcendence over creation, it reconciles divine foreknowledge with human freedom, and it remains consistent with other attributes of God, such as His immutability, or unchanging nature.

Davis has three arguments against God being timeless. It is not compatible with God as creator. For God created the world at some time T, then either at T God creates the world which would make God temporal, or God creates the world and the world firsts exists at T which would mean there is a need for a notion of a-temporal causation, which he doesn’t think there is. Davis thinks all causes obtain a temporal relation. Davis also thinks God being timeless is incompatible with Biblical accounts, since God is described as anticipating and remembering, which seem to be temporal acts. Davis also argues that there is an incoherence with His other attributes. To explain omniscience, for example, some say that all times are simultaneously present to God, which is incoherent. It seems true, for example, that God’s decision to create me in 1990 and God’s will to create me in 1990 are not simultaneous. 

Davis’ position regarding the relationship between God and time is to say that God is temporally eternal. God does have temporal location and extension and distinctions like “past, present, and future” can be meaningfully applied to God, and there never was or will be a moment when God does not exist. God exists alongside time, but wasn’t measurable until the creation of things. 

The two arguments for a timeless God that McCann discusses deal with God’s sovereignty and God’s immutability. The sovereignty argument says that if God is in time, then His sovereignty is restricted, for how could God know what I will do tomorrow if I haven’t decided yet? But since God’s sovereignty is not restricted, God is thus not in time. The immutability argument says that if God were in time, then God would change some of His properties, such as shifting relations of simultaneity with events in the world. But since God does not change any of His properties, God is not in time. In this case, merely being in time would give God accidental properties, and accidental properties are subject to change, which could not be true of an immutable God.

McCann responds to Davis’ problems by arguing that causation is not an intrinsically temporal concept. So if one were to hit a ball, there seems to be a constant conjunction between the hitting of the ball and the moving of the ball. There is no intermediating event or thing called a “cause” that take up time between the two events of hitting the ball and moving it. Causation is atemporal because causation is not a process. Further, our causing something is not a guide to God’s creative activity because for us to act, we must be present in time. Our acts are limited by the world, but this is not true of God, for God created the world ex nihilo. Nor does one have to deny the reality of time, as Davis seems to think it does, if we reject that God is in time. Davis also rejects that God in space, but Davis doesn’t think space isn’t real, and so the same would be true of time. 

McCann’s challenge to proponents of a temporal creating God is how to explain God’s creative act without being arbitrary. For if God created the world at some time, then he must have some sufficient reason for doing so, since God is rational. But what could possibly be the reason to create at one time and not another? The answer would seem to be arbitrary and contrary to what we would expect of God.